Rick's "40 Clove" Garlic Chicken

Ruth and I first had this dish at “The Stinking Rose” garlic restaurant in San Francisco.  You probably thinking. “Forty cloves of garlic is an awful lot of garlic!”  While forty whole cloves may seem like a whole lot of bad breath, peeling, and a possible vampire repellant, it turns out this dish is not nearly as intense as the name might first imply. And that’s a really good thing! The garlic cloves are roasted and braised in olive oil and the rendered chicken juices in the pan.  This makes the roasted garlic slightly nutty and sweet. You can eat the whole cloves and not even get garlic breath. The chicken is initially roasted at a high heat to crisp the skin and basted with the garlicky pan juices.  Delicious!!

Ingredients:

40 cloves of garlic, peeled ( I purchased pre-peeled ones from the grocery store)
1 chicken, cut into pieces
Kosher salt (or herb salt from my turkey recipe)
Fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon fresh Rosemary leaves
2 tablespoons good olive oil
¼ cup mayonnaise
½ cup chicken broth
2 large onions, cut into ½” slices
3 tablespoons Chardonnay wine
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour mixed in 2 Tbs water to form a slurry

Directions:

Wash and thoroughly dry the chicken pieces.

Season the pieces liberally with herb salt and fresh ground pepper on both sides.  

In a roasting pan or large Dutch oven, place the ½” thick onion slices on the bottom to form a roasting rack.  

Add the 40 cloves of garlic to the pan.

Liberally coat the onions and garlic with good extra virgin olive oil.  

Place the chicken pieces on the onions.  Coat the pieces with mayonnaise (I like Duke’s).  

Just rub the mayo on the chicken with your fingers.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.  Place the pan in the oven and cook for 15 minutes to jump-start browning the skin.  Lower the heat to 325 degrees and cook for 10 minutes.  Add the chicken stock to the pan and continue cooking, basting frequently with the pan juices, until the internal temperature at the thickest part of the breast meat reaches 165 degrees.  If the skin isn’t quite crispy and brown, turn on the broiler for a minute or two.  

When the chicken is done, remove the pan from the oven.  Spoon the pan juices into a fat separator and allow the fat and oil to rise to the top.  

Carefully pour the garlic infused pan juices into a sauce pot.  

Discard the excess fat and oil remaining in the separator.  Add ½ cup chicken broth to the sauce pot and bring to a boil.

Add 2 tablespoons of Chardonnay wine.  

Mince several cloves of the roasted garlic into the sauce pot and simmer to reduce by about half.  

Whisk 2 Tbs of flour into 2 Tbs of water to form a slurry.  

Pour the slurry into the sauce and whisk until the sauce thickens.

Remove the chicken to a platter and place the roasted garlic cloves over the chicken pieces.  

Pour the garlic sauce over the chicken and serve hot.

Enjoy!